


Results of the Research

by rustykitchenscissors



Category: The Simpsons
Genre: Closeted Character, College, Coming of Age, F/F, Hair Dyeing, High School, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Mental Health Issues, Mentions of Cancer, Mild Sexual Content, Motorcycles, Multi, POV Lesbian Character, Pablo Neruda - Freeform, Poetry, References to Addiction, Tarot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-13
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-21 02:11:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2450831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustykitchenscissors/pseuds/rustykitchenscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn’t want tame, exactly. She wants someone rocking on the precipice of tame, one foot still ensnared by the wilderness, but ready, when she calls, to fall into her pink room and play dolls or dress-up with her or listen to Tapestry with closed eyes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Results of the Research

Bart wears a velvet robe and smokes a bubble pipe and Lisa wears her red dress. Red as a handmaid, red as a capital A. When she passed Bart’s room earlier, he was fussing with his hair, making it point up, making it point down, making it point half-up and half-down, spraying it with something that made him cough and drop the pipe from between his lips.  _Dear log,_ she wrote when she returned from the kitchen,  _What is the big deal about Laura?_ She sucked on her pen cap for a moment.  _Boys are so stupid. They'd cut off their own heads to make you think they're manly, as though the path to a woman's heart isn't self-assuredness and the unrehearsed vulnerability of a Corey Masterson._ Was that accurate? She added an addendum:  _(Research further.) Also ask mom to bake more chocolate cherry cookies please._

Older girls have always made Lisa self-conscious. Like they're evaluating her ability to be feminine and finding her lacking. Actually, girls her own age make her feel that way too. No matter how many Malibu Stacys she dresses up or how many stuffed animal tea parties she hosts or little Miss Springfields she becomes, her face is too plain; she can't put nail polish on her (Homer’s) stubby fingers right; she's been taught to belch openly and complain loudly and she takes up too much space. Any quiet moment makes her face hot as she looks from her hands to the other girl’s hands and back again. But Laura slouches in with her army jacket and unbrushed hair and barely looks at Lisa at all.

-

Lisa’s almost asleep when a motorcycle rips Evergreen Terrace’s silence open like a seam. Curled between her body and the pillows, Nancy Drew is trudging through the snow in pursuit of a man in a long black coat. Lisa knows how it ends; she’s read every Nancy Drew book at least ten times by now, but the plots carve comforting grooves in her brain.  _The problem is presented in an orderly package. The problem is investigated with the help of some friends. The problem is solved._

Problem: the motorcycle’s big ugly yell. Investigation: walking to the window. Friends: Nancy Drew, Bess Marvin, George Fayne. Solution: The bike belongs to Jimbo Jones and soon the bike will be gone. Behind him is Laura, head leaned against his back, arms wrapped loosely, carelessly, around his waist in a concession to the inevitability of getting hurt. They’re headed not downtown, to where they could TP statues and steal beers from the Kwik-E Mart, but toward the woods, where they won’t be able to see each other in the dark and the ghosts of past initials carved into tree trunks will whisper in their ears what it really means to be two outcasts in love with violence and in violent love. Jimbo wears his hat pulled down low like he thinks it’s a helmet. Laura wears a red dress. Red as a bitten lip.

“Never love,” Bart says when he walks in on her brushing her teeth the next morning. “Seal all your emotions away now in a fireproof box where no one can ever get to them. There’s still time for you, Lise. My time…is up.” He drops to the floor and proceeds to drag his way down the hallway, groaning, tearing up patches of carpet that will never be replaced.

-

Okay, so maybe she pretends, when the whole Nelson thing happens, that it comes as some kind of a surprise. Like she hasn’t wanted for a month to feel that motorcycle earthquaking beneath her like a private roller coaster or to know what she imagines to be the worldly solitude of kissing beneath the full moon. Her practical Lisa brain says, “Over 2,000 motorcycle-related deaths per year,” says, “Lung cancer,” but the only images she can conjure up are like  _Itchy and Scratchy_ episodes. The blood is the color of tomato soup and the squishy round internal organs make her heave bright belly laughs.

So it happens. She doesn’t want tame, exactly. She wants someone rocking on the precipice of tame, one foot still ensnared by the wilderness, but ready, when she calls, to fall into her pink room and play dolls or dress-up with her or listen to  _Tapestry_ with closed eyes.

Kissing Nelson both tastes and feels like sandwiches. White bread, liverwurst, Velveeta, one wilting lettuce leaf, made by her mom and packed in a picnic basket and left to sit in the car’s hot trunk for an hour. He’s in his argyle and she’s in her red and Ouranos is in his most majestic starry robes of violet and she can feel the whole city watching them like one veiny, pulsing eye, one perfect rotting-sewage new noir hellhole that will always, always love her back, and Nelson’s lips are. Kind of mushy. And his integrity is too.

-

When Aunt Patty comes out, Lisa. When Aunt Patty comes out, it's that. When Aunt Patty comes out. When Aunt Patty comes out--When Aunt Patty comes out, When Aunt Patty comes out? Lisa doesn't know. She puts that away.

-

She's eleven and she asks Janey if she wants to kiss her. Janey's just finished dying Lisa's hair black as a wormhole or a turned-off TV. Dye bleeds from her fingertips and a spot below the collar of her dress, and Lisa feels bad about that, but Janey has ten more dresses just like it anyway. They’re on Lisa’s bed with their newly long legs laid lazily over each other, twisting the leftover tinfoil from the dye job into hearts and stars (Janey) and Möbius strips (Lisa). Her voice, when she asks, is higher than it’s been in a few years, that pitch previously called upon for questions about horses or government spending, now hidden beneath the molten monotone of a girl who’s learned that only she cares that she cares. “Janey, do you want to kiss me?” all colored with stuffed-animal-tea-party pep, and Janey’s legs jerk out from under Lisa’s, almost hypnagogic.

"Lisa, I like boys." 

“Well, we all like boys, Janey. But heterosexual leanings don’t preclude the exploration of burgeoning romantic and sexual feelings in an intimate context free from the toxicity of the male ego. I mean, recall Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hicock, Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, Buffy and Faith—”

“Boys, Lisa,” Janey says, and she gets up and she finds her shoes and she leaves.

“Well, that was the worst idea I ever had,” Lisa says to herself in the mirror. Her black-haired self, her self wrapped in a ratty towel, her self unkissed, and without rudder or net.

-

High school gym class is less torturous than middle school gym class was less torturous than the pungent cesspool of humiliation that was gym class in elementary school. District-wide budget cuts mean that there are no gym teachers, no tumbling mats, no one-ball-per-sport-except-baseball-and-basketball-which-always-had-to-share; even the ropes that once dangled from the ceiling like the straight-ironed ponytails of less spiky-haired girls were cut down by repo men and burned on the front lawn. That afternoon, Lisa could see the smoke from where she sat on the roof of 742 Evergreen Terrace, holding  _Ulysses_ in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other and telling herself, “I will not I will not I will not.”

Addiction runs river-deep in her genes. Every day, she remembers being a Floridian monster, rubbery and neglected.

The cigarette stayed unlit in her hand, and somewhere, she heard the low strumming of a bass, and a voice, crooning, just a hairsbreadth out of tune but rich as fudge-frosted devil’s cake.  _She rings my bell/I’ve got gym class in half an hour_ , punctuated with a hiccupping laugh, and Lisa knows that laugh, has heard it twinning countless times with the seam-rip suddenness of a motorcycle tearing through the night, giddy with life. And yes, now, on the roof opposite, poking out from behind the chimney, the neck of the bass, and a young woman’s red-nailed hand, nimble and steeple-y, moaning out the song.

-

Sherri grows up and apart from her sister. Terri the track legend, the burgeoning prom queen, sweet and ragdoll-docile. Sherri teases her lilac hair big and curls it curly and her breath always tastes like peppermint schnapps from the sparkly flowered flask she keeps in her bag.

The custodial closet is their favorite cliché together, gross with a carpet of Willy’s fiery beard-trimmings, amusement park ambience imbued by the abundance of sawdust and half-digested corn dogs stolen from the cafeteria. They kiss artlessly through Study Hall, knowing  _cataglottism is by no means confined to pigeons._ The first time, Lisa, who despite all appearances and reputations and A triple pluses, never learns a lesson, asked, “Sherri, do you want to kiss me?” with a bite, as she sat on the makeshift bleachers and Sherri smoked below them and poked Lisa in the thigh and teased her for reading a book with “erotic” in the title.

“Sherri, do you want to kiss me?” and Sherri said, “I fucking knew it,” and poked her harder in the thigh, and stubbed out her cigarette, and grabbed Lisa’s hand to pull her below.

“Your breasts seem like white snails,” Lisa intones. “A butterfly of shadow has come to rest on your belly.”

Sherri wrinkles her nose. “Did you just call my boobs snails?”

“Oh, um. It was Neruda.”

“You mean it was yes rude, uh.” They aren’t friends, to be sure. Lisa’s friends: figments, histories, Bitches Brew and Taylor Swift. Sherri’s mouth is tangy-beautiful and clever but doesn’t wrap around conversation with anything but urgency, and her legs are fun to pry apart like oysters but they don’t walk the walk she talks with the patches on her jacket and her claims to love danger, and glistening fear.

Lisa eats some escargot.

-

For prom, Milhouse wears a pink seersucker suit that he borrowed from Kurt and that Bart claims makes him look classy as a denizen of  _The Prisoner_ ’s Island. Both proms. Both proms, Lisa clutches, delicately, his wrist.

- 

When Lisa was a child, she thought she’d go to Princeton, Yale, or Smith or Penn, maybe something out of the blue and secluded-dry like St. John’s College in Santa Fe. But money is money and Mom is Mom, and the thought of leaving her so far alone in their derelict house cleaning up after Dad engenders thick braids of guilt in Lisa’s gut. So despite her acceptances to Princeton, Yale, Smith, Penn, she goes to Springfield University, with a double major in Environmental Science and Women’s Studies, and a minor in French (she still yearns with her whole body to die playing her sax, destitute and over-sexed in the streets of Par _is_ ).

She lives, at least, in a dorm, so that when Mom calls her on the videophone and asks in her dish-soap-and-steel-wool voice if Lisa’s met any cute boys, and Lisa giggles and says, “No, not yet,” no one but her rave-loving roommate knows that just this morning, she woke up with her fingers tangled in a senior girl’s crimson fauxhawk, a marked-up copy of _Ariel_ nestled between their bodies. The girl’s name was Angel, and when pressed, did not know Lisa’s name was Lisa.

-

She reads the emptinesses in Sappho and tries, on the quad late at night—a pepper spray in each pocket—to compose something half so close to the hollow ache that habitually inhabits her once-dreamy heart.

-

Each Saturday, she arrives back home with a load of laundry she can do for free and a stack of textbooks to read as she perches, corvidesque, on the quaking washing machine so it won’t run rampant all over the basement. It’s a drag having to reread  _The Feminine Mystique_ , like they weren’t all nine-years-old at one time or another, but the thing about herself that Lisa holds most closely to her chest is that she endures.

The basement is Momspace that once was drunk-on-Edison-and-eighteen-Duffs Dadspace but now smells like off-brand Crisp Blue Mountain dryer sheets and clothes ironed to the precipice of burning. It’s warm, dark, and  _Womblike_ , Lisa muses, with some disgust at her own uninventiveness. She sets aside Friedan for  _L’etranger_ , grateful to the washer’s racket for drowning out the sound of her clumsy mouth attempting to wrap its way around words she knows nearly by heart, if only in her mother tongue.

La porte s'ouvre. Not the door at the top of the steps, but the door to the thickly polluted air and neon skyline of Outside, bringing all that brightness and bad smell in. Lisa shields her eyes and does her best Dracula hiss.

“Wow, college really has changed you,” and it’s Laura Powers. Her army jacket’s been replaced with oxblood leather, her hair chopped in a kitchen-scissor Marie Prevost bob. In her arms is a wicker basket topped high with dirty clothes in shades of soot, and on her face, a teasing smile. “Though I’m shocked you’re not sleeping in a coffin this time of day.”

She plomps her basket down in front of her and Lisa runs a hand through her own hair, bleached a few shades more lunar than its natural sunshine yellow and probably in need of washing. She expects to find herself suddenly self-conscious, caught lazy in her makeshift womb, but Laura’s smudged eyeliner recalls Lisa’s Goth phase of eight years past and Lisa snorts, that Homerish noise she’s never been able to escape.

“Oh, my coffin’s being reupholstered,” she offers after a moment of silence.

“Well, our washing machine’s being broken. Your mom gave me a key. If you don’t have another load to do after that one.”

“No, no, go ahead.” Without thinking, Lisa shifts to the edge of the washer, and Laura takes the invitation, pushing herself up next to Lisa with one strong arm. “The machines at school are just too much money, you know. Or I guess you wouldn’t really know.”

Laura digs her elbow into Lisa’s side, hard like Milhouse never would have. Sturdy. “Excuse me, miss thing. I went to college. I was a biochemistry major.” She pauses, smirking. “And then I dropped out because traveling was way sicker.”

“Huh.” Their legs kick against the washer in rhythm. “So what’re you doing back in Springfield?”

“Mom got cancer.”

Laura Powers, if Lisa remembers correctly from her childhood rolodex of local color, is twenty-four, an only child, a textbook Aries—if you believe in that kind of thing, and Laura does—and the kind of woman who wears her bodily fluids close to the skin, blood and sweat and saliva forming a slippery, reckless halo around her every movement.

“I didn’t know,” is all Lisa knows how to say, in a tone hushed as Sunday morning in some other family’s pew.

-

Milhouse calls. Late at night. Every night. Milhouse calls on her pastel pink dorm room phone with the curly cord and the donkey bray of a ring, and Lisa picks up the handset and lets it dangle, leaving his voice to whisper into the unlistening room as she lies curled in a ball on a pillow of textbooks, watching the moon hover like a hummingbird, full of grace.

-

It seems the Powers’ washing machine is always busy being broken. Saturdays, Lisa leaves her bicycle in the front yard, the neon green of Gatsby’s need, and surely, Laura trickles in with a hamper on her hip and lipstick on her teeth and in her eyes, something so purely mammalian it makes Lisa quake at her already vibrating knees to think of giving it name.

Mostly, they sit in companionable silence as Lisa reads Foucault, Rimbaud, longs honestly for days spent reading only for herself, and Laura spreads tarot cards out in intricate answer to questions only she can hear. The first time Lisa bring her saxophone, its bulk combined with that of her laundry makes her feel like the Wicked Witch trying to pedal through a twister. “Play me something scientific,” Laura says, batting her eyelashes.

Lisa does the saxophone solo from “I Put a Spell On You,” just to spite her.

Next time, Laura brings her guitar, and Lisa says, “Play me something that peers into the future with eyes wide open and does not like what it finds.” 

Laura laughs at her. Laura plays Neko Case’s “Deep Red Bells,” and her voice is a deep red bell in itself.

-

“Judgment is an angel with golden hair and a horn. Its appearance means it’s time for you to make a hard choice. To stand up.” Head bent, legs pretzeled, Laura slips the card back into the deck.

-

Milhouse calls Milhouse calls Milhouse calls Milhouse calls

-

Entering through the kitchen, Lisa smells Mom’s chocolate cherry cookies, and her mouth goes from tasting like fair trade coffee full of soy milk to remembering what it’s like to melt. “Oh, honey,” Mom says without turning from the oven, “bring some of these down to the Powers girl. She looked in a bad way when I went down to pick up my, err, unmentionables.” A sheet of cookies rests beside her on the counter, and Lisa balances it on top of her laundry, gives Mom a forlorn smile—the kind of smile she knows best from Lisa, all Lisa’s life, the kind that followed grueling hockey practice and abandoned ponies and forsaken intellectual ideals—and heads downstairs.

Descent is familiar. Exiting the angelic light of being first, being home, being bravest and most blinding. Descent from the stage. Descent from the saddle. Descent from her high horse, ha ha ha ha ha. Descent down the stairs to where moonshine and explosions might await her, or a basket of warm, red cotton, smelling of the kind of crisp air Springfield has always worked to deny her. From childhood to a foreign and post-pubescent body, she has shrunk in on herself, and now: the descent to her knees where Laura has already descended to her own by the dryer’s open mouth.

“My mom made cookies,” Lisa says. Laura’s arms are full of jeans and her spine mirrors them in its slumpy pile.

“You ever ridden a motorcycle, Lise?”

“No, but I have had dreams about it.” Words garble around a mouth full of cookie. Cherry-bright, chocolate-dangerous.

“I miss going somewhere,” Laura says. “I’m just full of urges all the time.”

“Rumeurs des Villes, le soir, et au soleil, et toujours.”

Laughter: a knife, the way knives make blood pacts and slice through hair. “You and your fucking poetry, man.” Laura tugs at Lisa’s pearl necklace ( _drunken bell/for your hands smooth as grapes_ , but Laura’s hands are rough, calloused and over-scrubbed) so that her neck is carried forward and her head with it.

“I like to keep lists of urges,” Lisa says. “It keeps me in a straight line.”

“Straight?” Laura says with her hand in Lisa’s necklace.

“Heterosexuality is a dying fish with its mouth carved into a sinister grin.”

Laura has knowledge that Lisa can’t obtain, that takes place in valleys and sunsets and roadside motels full of unsavory characters, and casts aside as irrelevant old family recipes and controversies about Springfield’s acid rain likelihood compared to the clean skies of Shelbyville, and—

So this is when Laura kisses her.

-

Milhouse calls, and Lisa picks up, and Lisa says, “I’m thinking of going away,” and Milhouse cries.

-

She’s got money saved up from essay competitions and waitressing at Scumby’s Diner. Laura’s got a motorcycle and a mother in remission. The world’s got a long, long throat ready to swallow her, and Paris is only a figment of her childhood desire, ignorant of how any back road can take her where she needs, with her red dress, with her red tongue, with her golden hair and her horn and romance: something ineffable, something needed like urea nitrogen in the blood.

 


End file.
